Just a semi-typical homeschooling family

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Monthly Archives: February 2012

Cameron’s fourth grade box arrived Wednesday. Of course FedEx never knocks and always uses the door that not only we don’t use but it doesn’t even have a pathway to the driveway. We’ve told them several times to go around the circle and use the other door and they always say they will make a note of it, but they continue to leave packages at the wrong door leading to us sometimes not realizing we have things sitting for a few days.

But I digress.

So, anyway, his box got here Wednesday, but we didn’t know it was here until too late to open. So Thursday was box day. He dragged it in still in the plastic bag they had put it on (oh, yeah, in addition to not knocking and just dropping it, they left it there in an unprotected location in the drizzly rain… can you tell I’m really not a FedEx fan?).

We opened up his box to check out his new stuff (yay, no more reading work pages… boo, still activity pages… yay, a real math textbook… boo, still have a math practice book… and so on).

Here’s his next year of school! He refused to smile because, apparently, smiling about school things is just not the thing to do when you are a 10 year old boy and would rather be playing outside between 8am and noon every day.

So what’s in the box? All sorts of exciting, awesome stuff. Well, at least it’s exciting and awesome according to me! Each year of Calvert is a different color. Fourth grade is yellow.

Lesson manuals – two for the core and one for math

Math – Calvert Math and Math Practice and Enrichment Workbook; fourth grade is the first year that the math textbook is a hardcover one that you don’t write in

Language Arts – Poetry Selections, Grammar workbook, Phonics workbook, Spelling workbook, Critical Thinking workbook, Vocabulary Connections workbook; we gave up on the phonics and critical thinking workbooks for 3rd grade, but Cameron has come a long way since then so we’re going to try and see how these workbooks go this year; spelling we will definitely not use since we use Sequential Spelling for him instead of Calvert’s spelling

Reading – Robinson Crusoe, Famous Legends, Mighty Men, and Island of the Blue Dolphins; fourth grade is the first year that all of the reading selections are “real” books rather than all or mostly reading textbooks with several shorter stories in them

Social Studies and Science – Science: A Closer Look, activity pages, A Child’s History of the World, A Child’s History of the World workbook, Maps Globes Graphs Level D; he had the choice between CHOW and a traditional social studies and geography textbook, he chose CHOW even though we’ve already been through it when we did Sonlight cores 1 and 2 because he doesn’t remember it at all

Miscellaneous Papers – two pads of lined paper, one pad of plain paper, a little composition book, and two sets of art cards